Jul 15th 2017

A Duel Hand Disaster makes you risk it all every time

A Duel Hand Disaster: Trackher is a splitscreen single player game, made by Ask an Enemy Studios, where your points only matter if you live. You control two ships individually with each thumbstick and both ships have very different objectives. Having to focus on two screens doing different things makes the game's name, ADHD, very appropriate.

On the left of the screen you kill enemies to score points like a classic ship based shooter, and on the right you recover resources to multiply those points. However, whenever you shoot or move on the left you lose resources. Run out of resources and you're in for a bad time. Once you reach full capacity of resources you can leave with your score, or you could try and stick it out longer to score even more points. Just remember that if you die your score becomes zero.

When you do a second run things will get harder and you'll get a chance to place a wager of all or some of your previous score. If you reach it, and can extract with it alive you'll get to keep it, but if you die, then even your previous leaderboard position will be erased with your life. It is definitely a risky situation to play the game at all.

There are some real consequences to scoring in A Duel Hand Disaster: Trackher. You can't just keep running in and dying over and over until you have the highest score. You've got to think about both screens doing different things while considering when the best time to cut your losses and leave while you have a chance is.

A Duel Hand Disaster: Trackher is currently on Kickstarter trying to fund the last 10% of the game to get it out in 2017. The game has been through rejection after rejection by publishers and the industry, but the developers have persevered. They've brought the game to event after event to get feedback directly from players, and it turns out people are really interested in the game. So if you're curious at all, I can't recommend enough that you at least check out their Kickstarter page to see what they have going on. Maybe give something wildly different from most games coming out a shot. As always, let me know what you think through Twitter @spencerhavens.